What is The True Cost of Your Campus Network?

During these times of budgetary concerns in both private and public sectors with ongoing reductions in discretionary spending, IT managers are being forced to look at every possible way to cut costs.

According to the Federal Office of Management and Budget, IT hardware actually represents only 20 percent of the total Federal IT spend. The lion’s share of the budget goes toward paying IT services including annual hardware maintenance contracts.

Federal IT Budget Spend Breakdown

Source: Federal OMB

When it comes to purchasing network infrastructure, the total cost of ownership over the useful lifetime of the equipment is not always easy to evaluate causing the initial price of acquisition to often play a disproportionate role in the purchase decision.

According to Gartner, enterprise customers expect a useful life of 5 to 10 years for their network infrastructure. Over such an extended ownership period the initial cost of acquisition is going to represent only a fraction of the total cost.

So it’s important for IT departments to evaluate the total cost of ownership, including the cost of service and support, power, cooling and floor space, over the expected life of the network when making the vendor selections.

Additionally, when looking at different vendors, it is important to compare complete network solutions rather than simply looking at the price of base level product configurations. For example product offerings will vary broadly in capabilities such as port density, redundant power supplies and stacking to name a few. For some vendors these capabilities come standard in base product configurations while for others, they are costly options.

To help determine the true cost of your campus network, you can use our new Brocade Campus TCO calculator to compare the cost of 35 prebuilt network solutions from Brocade, Cisco, HP and Aruba.

Please note: Certain product lines referenced on this website have been acquired by third party buyers and may no longer be supported, offered or sold by Brocade. These product lines include, but are not limited to, the Virtual Router (vRouter), Virtual Application Delivery Controller (vADC), the Virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) and the Software Defined Networking (SDN) Controller. Any mention of these product lines, including associated services and support on this site, as it relates to Brocade should now be considered historical reference only. Ongoing use of such products may be subject to terms and conditions of the buyer.

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